[tsimionescu]

It should be noted that animals won't stop suffering if we stop eating them. Animals in the wild usually live pretty desperate lives, and universally, always, 100% die horrible, horrible deaths that industrial processes would never inflict on them - their flesh tore open as they flee in a panic, or slowly starving to death as disease makes them unable to feed and insects burrow into their living bodies, or suffocating, or drowning or frostbite or or or.

I'm not claiming that farm lives (or worse, industry lives) are in any sense good, or even better, but it's important to remember that nature itself has no qualms in inflicting pain and suffering on animals.

Not to mention, we're only starting to learn how complex plants and fungi are, and that they have their own abilities to perceive the world, react to it, and communicate their reactions to other individuals. If (and this is a huge If, I fully admit that) it turns out plants and fungi are also capable of emotion or hurt, we really will need to re-examine some base assumptions of our morality.

[sweetheart]

I don't think any of that is relevant to the moral issue of eating animals when we don't need to to survive.

The fact that animals die horrible deaths in the natural world is entirely irrelevant to our moral obligations to induce suffering.

We can cross the plants-feel-pain bridge when and if we get there.